Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of computer processors. More particularly, the invention relates to a method and apparatus for efficiently executing hash operations.
Description of the Related Art
The Secure Message (SM)-3 hash function is a new cryptographic function published by the Chinese Commercial Cryptography Administration for the convenience of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) communities. SM3 is currently specified as the hashing algorithm for the TCM (Trusted Computing Module) by the China Information Security Standardization Technical Committee (TC260 for short) initiative. The design of SM3 builds upon the design of Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA)-2 by adding additional features to strengthen the has function such as feeding two message-derived words into each round, as opposed to only one in the case of SHA-2.